Gender Pay Gap and Media

Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co.
Leading up to the Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case of 1970, women had been primarily viewed as being part of the domestic sphere. Their traditional role in society was to take care of the house and kids while the man went to work and supported the family by earning the paycheck. Following WWII, when the women were pushed out of the home by the necessity of the war effort needed at the home front to keep the soldiers supplied abroad, a change in society was effected. Woman began to feel less and less restricted to the domestic sphere. Betty Friedan let slip the bugle cry to women in 1963 with her book The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women were being treated like slaves of their husbands and of the patriarchal order—that their place was not to be confined to the kitchen as they wore heels and tried to do their best Mary Tyler Moore impression. Rather, they had a right to self-actualize and work alongside men: they should not be expected to reproduce babies and care for them—that was the essence of Friedan’s argument, which helped to prompt the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Another Feminist, Gloria Steinem, led the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s by founding Ms. Magazine and promoting abortion as a fundamental women’s right and as an empowering practice over the male patriarchy. This was the climate into which the case of Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co was thrust: Schultz was a woman who wanted equal pay for equal work. The Wheaton Glass Co. had given her a title that was different from her male peers’ though she was doing the same work as they. Because she had a different title, though, she was not paid the same. She sued and won with the Court ruling that Wheaton Glass was violating the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Woody).
The Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case helped to reinforce the changing ideas about gender that were kicking about at the time. Thanks to Friedan’s book, Steinem’s magazine, and countless other issues, activists, and stories all promoting women’s rights and women’s equality, the Schultz case was a legal example of how perceptions of gender were changing in America. The old pre-1960s traditional gender norms and traditional gender roles, in which women were expected to play a supporting role to men were directly challenged by the outcome of the Schultz case. The Court held that women who did the same work as men had the right to expect the same pay, regardless of the title the company chose to give them.
This was just the first in a series of battles between the Women’s Movement and the Patriarchy of the West that resulted in the refining of gender to such a degree that now it is now longer a question of “Him” and “Her” but also of whatever pronoun the LGBTQ+ community prefers. The media played a significant role in this development. For instance, the story of Bruce Jenner switching genders to become Caitlyn Jenner was one of the biggest news stories in recent years (Robinson)—and it never would have been possible had the foundation for challenging traditional gender norms not been laid by the leaders of the Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation—and court cases like Schultz v. Wheaten Glass Co., which legitimized the women’s march for equal rights from a legal standpoint.
The Schultz case came three years before Roe v. Wade, when Feminists won another enormous legal challenge, which gave them the right to abort their babies. Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would say that the Roe v. Wade was one of the most decisive moments for women in history: “Better bitch than mouse,” Ginsburg said (Rosen). She also asserted that “government has no business making that choice for a woman,” referring to the lawfulness of abortion as a fundamental women’s right (Bazelon). Thus, one can see that media played a huge role, here, too—by focusing more on abortions rights activists than on the equal pay problem. The 1970s were thus a monumental decade for women’s rights activists and helped to shift the way in which gender was considered as a norm, but media was not focusing on the gender pay gap as much as it was on gender and sexuality. By the 2000s, traditional gender norms were so far gone from the mainstream that a former male Olympian would become a public hero/heroine for coming out as a woman. This would have been unheard of in the 1950s or even in the 1960s. The 1970s was the transformation era, and Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. was a kind stress-test to see how far the establishment was willing to yield to the women’s rights movement. When Schultz won the case, it was shown that the patriarchy was not as formidable as once thought and that room for reimagining the way people thought about gender could be a real possibility.
In a way, Schultz capitalized on the chaos that was swarming at the time too—but it was not sensational enough for the media to really be a story that had legs. The 1960s had truly been a revolutionary decade, for instance, and the media wanted more stories full of human drama. A President had been assassinated in 1963. His brother, a presidential candidate, was assassinated five years later in 1968. Two African American activists—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X—were assassinated the same decade. The Civil Rights Movement had grown into a force to be reckoned with in the earlier part of the decade, and by the latter part of the decade a foreign war abroad (Vietnam) was leading to social unrest at home. The Kent State shootings at the Ohio college campus in May 1970, the same year as the Schultz case, showed (as reported by CBS News at the time) that the culture of America was becoming completely fraught with tension: things were so bad that everyone was snapping and the order of society was seemingly coming apart at the seams, as the new generation of young people (activists, protestors, revolutionaries, and so on) clashed with the old order (law enforcement, the traditional patriarchy). The National Guard at Kent State “fired its weapons indiscriminately” into a crowd of protestors, killing 4 (CBS Evening News). The problems of the times were needing to be settled, and the Schultz case appeared like a way to begin to address some of them—but settling problems has never been the media’s forte: it likes stories that never end because that is what drives ratings. It likes stories that generate controversy.
So every once in a while the gender pay gap story comes back up: as local news CBS 19 out of Tyler, Texas, reported recently, the gender problem when it comes to equal pay has never really gone away—and now researchers are showing that it is wider than ever (CBS 19). In other words, the gender pay gap that Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. was supposed to legally do away with is still there, according to the report of CBS 19. This belief is held by many today and indicates that there is still some frustration among men and women about how equal pay should be determined and what part gender plays a part in that determination. Gender issues have become more accepted in the mainstream in some ways—for example, transgender issues are celebrated in the mainstream media, with several TV shows and films featuring transgender people in recent years have become popular. However, in terms of real, practical application, there is still divergence between what is articulated in the mainstream and what is seen in the real world. The victory that was Schultz’s in 1970 has not necessarily translated into a victory for women in the decades that ensued. In fact, some 50 years later, the discussion is still ongoing as to whether there are still equal rights between men and women. Gender studies, Feminism, Women’s Liberation—they have all come, and yet the questions of what is gender, what are gender roles, how should people address the issue of gender are still being asked because it is no less clear today than it was half a century ago.
My own personal thoughts about the importance of the case of Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. are that it, like so much in America, paid lip service to an idea that was being generated at the time that equality is an issue that has to be addressed. However, politics and the law are only one aspect of society, and there are other issues that come up over the course of history that impact society just as much. There are religious, cultural, social and economical issues that come into play. Some people are not accepting of the objectives of the Women’s Movement and of Women’s Liberation and viewed gender bending as unhealthy. The Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. was important in the sense that it could be seen as a moral victory for women in the workplace, but in terms of enforcing the Court’s decision across the board in all workplaces it has not been shown to be monumentally effective as women still feel there is a pay gap. Moreover, Roe v. Wade, three years later, was the real social changing case, as it completely did away with the Old World concept of what sex and marriage were for—procreation and the begetting of children and the starting of a family. Roe v. Wade made it legally possible for women to cut off the creation of life in their wombs, no questions asked. In terms of changing the way in which gender would be thought about for the next 50 years, it was monumental. Women would basically stop being viewed as potential carriers of new life for the planet and start being viewed as sterile receptacles of male deposits, as Tom Wolfe showed in I am Charlotte Simmons. Media played a role in shaping the narratives of these cases by exploring their social importance and by setting the stage for further developments. Whether they were magazines that promoted feminism like Ms. Magazine or mainstream news outlets like The New Republic, these cases were predominantly shown in positive lights to indicate how the culture of America was changing with respect to women, the gender pay gap and women’s rights.
Summary
The case of Schultz v. Wheaton Co. was a 1970 Supreme Court case that centered on whether a woman in the workplace had the right to be paid the same wage as her male peers who were doing the same work just under a different title. The Court found that the woman had the right to be paid the same wage under the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case’s outcome meant that the gender pay gap should have disappeared. However, as news reports have shown, the gender pay gap still appears to exist, even after 50 years. That raises the question as to where the shift in how gender is thought about has really gone. The answer to that question is that it shifted away from equal rights in the workplace to sex. Roe v. Wade helped to shift the issue of women’s rights away from equal pay in the workplace to what women had the right to do with their own bodies and, in particular, with their sexual reproduction organs. Whereas abortion had been illegal on traditional moral grounds prior to the 1970s, Roe v. Wade made it legal on politically correct grounds as determined by the new conception of women’s rights and gender norms. Traditional gender norms thus became suppressed and displaced as new ideas about what constituted gender began to be discussed and embraced in popular media—from shows to movies to magazines, gender became an issue linked primarily with sex and sexual preferences and abortion rights. People like Bruce Jenner, who became Caitlyn Jenner, stole the spotlight and media helped give it to them. Still, every once in a while, local and national media will give a brief spotlight to the old problem of the gender gap and go back to the issue that played an early, brief part on the stage—before gender normativity took a radically different direction.


Works Cited
Bazelon, E. “The Place of Women on the Court.” The NY Times, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&
CBS 19. “Report: Gender pay gap wider than discussed.” CBS19, 2018.
https://www.cbs19.tv/video/news/local/report-gender-pay-gap-wider-than-discussed/501-8347398
CBS Evening News. “Four killed in Kent State shooting.” YouTube, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmd6CHah7Wg
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. NY: Norton, 2001.
Robinson, Willis. “From growing breasts, surgery in Denmark and cross dressing in
public to marrying Kris and building a reality empire as a man: How Bruce backed out of 1980s sex change plan to transform himself into 'Heather'.” Daily Mail, 2016. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3055315/From-female-hormones-thoughts-Denmark-sex-exchange-cross-dressing-public-marrying-Kris-Bruce-Jenner-nearly-transitioned-1980s-planned-return-Aunt-Heather-children.html
Rosen, J. The Book of Ruth. New Republic, 1993.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/the-book-ruth
Steinhem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. NY: Henry Holt, 1984.
Woody, Robert Henley. The Law and the Practice of Human Services. Jossey-Bass
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